Thursday, October 30, 2008

Pain, yoga, harp music

My knee is not chipped, just sore. If it still hurts in a week I might need an MRI, but hopefully it will heal by then. I somehow doubt I will be able to teach yoga next Monday, however.

I skipped the whole ambulance/ER part by going directly to an orthopedist, who ordered the x-ray. Waiting in the main hospital lobby, with its high glass windows and mix of real and fake, indoor and outdoor plants was actually quite pleasant. An excellent harpist played popular songs including Lord of the Rings, that sounded really good on harp. The music helped take my mind off the pain for a while. I found someone else playing it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjW2Bk_2x-g

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Ouch

I think I may have chipped my kneecap. Falling off my bike after taking the curb at the wrong angle, I grazed my knee. All seemed fine until I passed out with the pain of having to sit with bent knees on the bus for almost an hour. About halfway through I decided to call and cancel my yoga class. It's an x-ray for me tomorrow morning, I guess.

I was hoping to be able to write something coherent about Modern Yoga by now, but it will have to wait. This I can say, I discovered that between my facebook networks and friends there are only about 50 people who list yoga among their religious views, and over 500 who list it as an activity. In contrast, there are over 500 who list Jewish among their religious views, and only 24 who list it in their activities. Tentative conclusion: many more people practice yoga than believe in it, whereas the opposite is true of Judaism.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Intersecting circles

At the end of her book, Encounters with the Invisible, Dorothy Wall writes about planning a trip to the mountains, the first in ten years after she collapsed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She and her husband spread maps of the Sierras on the bed, planning their route. I finish reading this book after returning from my trip to the mountains, and think about illness as an internal journey, one that is unplanned and unmapped, into uncharted territory, without even giving one's consent to go along for the ride.

Just last night, I was saying to my friend how healing it was to go out to the mountains, healing for the spirit to experience all the varied scenery, the change in air, and the sense of aloneness while at the same time being in the company of others. As we were walking, I thought about the people who had laid the trail, carving stairs in the rock, the people who must come out every spring to mark the trail with rows or piles of rocks on the white granite shelf, and all the footprints from this summer's hikers that must wash away if not with the first rain and snow then with the meltwater. My friend said that in the past, before cars, most people never traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace. I don't know if that was ever true. But I do think that places used to be more varied than they are now. Even in my own childhood, in the 70's and 80's in Britain and Israel, I remember each town having a different local character whereas now they are populated by the same chain stores, the same shopping malls and people. The villages in the mountains here in California retain their own character, for better or worse. We were lucky to find someone awake at midnight to give us a room to stay!

When I got back to the office today, somebody asked if I had makeup on, she thought I looked nice. I explained it was just being outdoors all weekend that put some color in my cheeks.

Dorothy Wall talks about a picture taken before her illness that she used to look to for reassurance of who she was. Then, in a later chapter, she realizes how one can never return. I think this is best captured in TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "Fare forward travellers! Not escaping from the past/Into different lives, or into any future;/You are not the same people who left the station..." We assume a continuity of self which is shattered by an illness that flies in the face of our ordinary can do mentality. Wall remembers her grandmother and her father reading to her from The Little Engine that Could the lines "I think I can, I think I can... I thought I could, I thought I could." Interestingly, the author of the eponymous engine was a house pseudonym of the publishing company, and the story one that had been retold many times. My grandmother used to read me that story, as I was reminded when I heard my mother reading it to my children. I believe that in life we are to some degree following tracks, but our engines are generally facing backwards and we spend most of our lives running away, even if we think we have eyes in the backs of our heads to see the next mountain and chug up it. My mother used to believe in geographical solutions to her problems, generally problems of the body that she attributed to the physical environment, both internal and external. She never realized that they were her fellow travelers and simply changed.

We generally choose the path of our physical bodies through space, and this helps us feel alive, like the Little Engine. We can spread out maps and navigate through the world. The effects this will have on our inner experience are less predictable. I think of all the times I might have bumped into Dorothy Wall in the streets of Berkeley, like leaves floating on a stream bumping into each other, maybe never to meet again, maybe to cross further downstream.

I think of my relationship with my friend, who thinks too much. Now he's got me thinking as well! As we walked through the burnt forest at the end of our hike, I was thinking for some reason that I would give him a facing edition of Dante's Divine Comedy for his next birthday, when he turns 35. Apparently, that was Dante's age when he wrote that or started writing it, contrary to the common myth that people in those days only lived to 30. "Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita..." I wonder if there is a particular circle of hell for overthinking, where all the Little Engines that Could chug up and down a mountain, never realizing that they are traveling backwards and going round and round in circles, never noticing that it's always the same mountain, and that they are not all alone in the woods.

Gem Lake, swimming

To appreciate the water you need to sense how it moves, sounds, and feels. Brrr... that was cold! Tasted great, though.
Posted by Picasa

Gem Lake, sunrise

Posted by Picasa

Gem Lake, afternoon

Posted by Picasa

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Gem Lake



Photographed upside down while doing yoga on the rocks.
Posted by Picasa

Lake in Emigrant Wilderness


Posted by Picasa

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Where the Devil?

Where did this idea of the Devil come from? I just returned from watching Dr. Faustus. It seems anathematic to the Jewish religion, I guess it must have come from somewhere else but it's so prevalent in most forms of Christianity and in the general culture. I've heard from people who believe they are the battleground of Good and Evil, and experience dreams of Spiritual Warfare. My view, after this evening, is that Evil comes from taking life too seriously. If you don't do that, then there are only mistakes.

I do like the idea of the seven deadly sins, however. Those, apparently, were invented by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th Century. What I like about them is the concept of responsibility, that I am responsible for my own lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride - not others to blame for providing temptations, challenges and irritation. The one thing I would add would be jealousy - in Hebrew there are no two separate words for envy and jealousy. It took me a long time to figure out what those words meant in English. Just as there is no word for Evil, only bad or wickedness.

Back to project sleep. Gotta wake up to teach yoga tomorrow morning.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Identity and Pain

I presented my idea that pain is essential to identity in my philosophy group, during a discussion on identity and the internet, and it led to some stimulating conversation which I will attempt to recapture here. To put my argument in a nutshell, when I'm dreaming (or online, in some assumed identity) I can't pinch myself to sense if I'm real. Some people objected to the distinction between what is real and what is not. Others argued that identity is a social construct determined by our interactions with others. One person said that emotional pain is equivalent (or identical, in the mathematical sense) to physical pain, and somebody else took that further to argue that emotional pain experienced in online relationships can have the same function of binding one to one's identity as physical pain has in real life. These arguments helped me crystallize my idea as follows:

The term identity has many meanings. One of them is how I see myself. Another is how I present myself to others, which may take the form of several different identities or fictions. Yet another is how others see me - although I can assume different identities, I can't entirely control how others see me. How I see myself is then influenced by how others see me. It's as though I look in a mirror and make myself up a certain way, then I go out in the world and copies of me are created in other people's minds, none of which are exactly the way that I wanted them to be, and then I see myself as I am reflected in their minds have to go through the whole process again. The internet, chat and e-mail communications with people have been for me a very distorting mirror in which to see myself, and I hypothesize that is because it's much easier to lie online so people are used to others wearing masks and project a lot more of their own interpretations about what might be hidden behind the mask. So I end up being reflected in all these people's distortions, and having to endlessly recreate myself. Some people suggested that this is a bandwidth problem, that text communication online lacks the richness of interpersonal, non-verbal communication. I agree that is part of the problem, and it sets the ground for the bigger problem of the possibility of lying (false identity) and consequent distrust or suspiciousness. Anyway, this realm of identity seems to be all mirrors and smokescreens.

Another realm of identity is an attempt to answer the questions, who am I and how do I know? This is where pain comes in. Pain is different from the other senses because my pain is in some way unique to me. We can all see the same table, touch it, taste the same ice-cream - albeit our experience might differ somewhat. But only I feel the pain in my body, and you feel the pain in your body. I can feel your pain, but this is qualitatively different from feeling my own pain. Emotions, like the other senses, tend to have objects - and can therefore be stimulated by objects of the imagination. I can imagine or recollect or meet online something terrifying, and feel fear in my body, feel my heart beating, my palms sweating, etc. Equally I can imagine something that makes me cry or laugh, or feel sexually aroused. But I can't imagine something physically hurting me and feel the pain in the same way. I can't even 'remember' the sensation of having an attack of gallstones a few months ago and the pain in my abdomen, because I can't imagine the object associated with that. Unconsciously, I think there is a way we can experience pain (or its absence) by hypnotic suggestion, but not by conjuring up an object of the imagination like with the other senses and with feelings. This unquestionable experience of pain, together with its inevitably aversive nature - I can't feel pain and not want it to stop - prevents me from getting lost in the hall of mirrors described by the other realm of identity. It also impacts my choices regarding inflicting pain on other sentient beings, whereas while I'm stuck in the hall of mirrors of the internet I have little or no compunction to act morally in the sense that my transgressions will not result in somebody getting beaten up or bleeding to death. If they exist, they will simply come back in another form.

I wonder if emotional pain, and the feeling of another's pain, bear the same relationship to the experience of pain as does memory of one's own pain? Going back to the idea of a community of pain, and how when I was in pain different people looked at me and communicated with me non-verbally, I am reminded that the sharp, shooting pain of gallstones brought to mind the searing abdominal pain of puerperal fever, when I felt as though I was going to die.

There is an inherent contradiction in the questions who am I, and how do I know? Because at some level I invent who I am and then I know it's a fiction. How do I know pertains to the I that came before the invention and that is the I that is raw intention, and the I that comes after the fictions, the bodily sensations that I do not invent or wish into existence.

When I started talking about this idea with my children, somebody (it may have been me) brought up the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Meanings of Identity

I was thinking that identity is related to pain, in the sense that when I hurt I know that I'm real, and that I'm really me. Now, reading Dorothy Wall's book Encounters with the Invisible, on her experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I think of a different meaning of identity. She writes about 'passing' for a healthy person, when really she is ill - both in her own mind, for many years, and then when her body denied her that pretense at least during those times when she went out into the world. Experiencing her pain internally, she refused to identify externally with an image of pain and illness. Her picture on the dust jacket, taken perhaps during this illness, shows a friendly, lively woman smiling engagingly at the camera from behind her large glasses. Yet she was exhausted, in pain, and had to rest for weeks after a walk in the park or a visit to the acupuncturist. This brings to mind at least two meanings of identity, how I see myself, and how I present myself to others. Then also, is it how I see myself (implying a mirror or a camera, a disembodied eye) or how I feel myself to be from the inside?

My experience is that there is a secret community of those in pain. When I twisted my knee dancing and then took a bus along Mission Street, a black homeless woman saw me standing and offered me her seat as she was getting off at the next stop. I don't know how she knew I was in pain because my sprain bandage was hidden under my pants and I was trying to look and feel normal. Another time, I was suffering from the pain of gallstones while shopping at the Farmers' Market, and the vendors at the fish stall looked right through me as though I wasn't there, moving on to the next person in the line. When there was nobody else waiting, I finally caught their attention, and they sold me a piece of fish without ever making eye-contact. On the other hand, the man in a wheelchair looked up at me and smiled, and the saxophone player playing blues on his saxophone held my gaze for a moment and nodded. I felt like one of the dead, in the story Where the Dead Live by Will Self. In this story, the author suddenly notices that his mother who has been dead for many years is actually still walking the streets and she tells him that when you die you simply go to live in another part of London. But maybe I'm not as good at hiding my pain as those who experience this more of the time.

So identity is how I present myself to the world, how I see myself, and how I feel on the inside. In math, identity means more than just equality. It is symbolized by equal with an extra, third parallel line, and signifies two quantities which are always equal, not just arbitrarily so in the present context. There are many circumstances in which how I see myself is not identical to how I present myself to the world, and then there is also how the world sees me, that can cause a re-interpretation of me to myself. I am thinking of my friend who had a Lithium atom tattooed on his wrist, expressing his identity as a nuclear physicist, only to discover it contains a star of David which has a whole different set of meanings, and is used as a symbol of identity by people with bipolar disorder because Lithium is often used as a medication in that condition. I might have my identity indelibly carved on my body, only to find out that other people see it differently from my intention. Bodily sensations such as pain, even the sensation of having a tattoo or piercing, are unquestionable, unlike all these images and how they are seen. Maybe I mean something deeper than identity is bound up with pain, a felt sense of who I really am.

Why is it so easy to spend 40 minutes fussing around on facebook as I just did, before I started writing this? Probably because of the limitless play around identity and its representation or misrepresentation. I listed myself as no longer single and a couple of friends sent me their cheery regards. When really I am still single, just no longer listed as such, taking a break from dating. And for some reason, I felt a need to take the trouble to correct them... Plus I invited my friend to play chess. Maybe he will ignore my request, that would probably be best for both of us.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Help! Mother's in town

Yesterday I returned to my old demons, checking e-mail multiple times per day. I hoped to get some solace by doing that, but in fact it only aggravated my anxiety.

I've been paying more attention recently to exactly how my mother undoes me. This morning I did not want to get out of bed, because she was throwing stuff around in the garage. She started doing that last night, while I was out at the theater with one of my sons, and my other son called because he was worried and scared. First I called a friend to see if I could find sanctuary at his apartment, but he was busy. So I gathered up my courage and went to ask my mother if she had found the thing she was looking for, which last night she blamed me for losing. She holds me responsible for taking care of the things she left in my garage, without telling me about them, because she has been carefully hoarding the stuff I left in my grandmother's house in London, which I told her she could throw away. Anyway, I don't say anything. Not about that, or the foods she left in the refrigerator and told me, which I stored on a special shelf for her while she was gone.

So she starts on at me about how she always thought I would make a contribution to humanity with my brilliant, mathematical mind and she doesn't see how I can possibly make a living in the present economic climate by being a therapist. I say nothing about the fact that when I was a teenager, she encouraged me to go to art school when I dropped out of my undergrad in physics and math. I say nothing about the fact that she has never held down a job of any kind or supported herself financially by working. She goes on to talk about recent research in clinical neuropsychology, and how someone at Stanford found that baby rats who received more maternal touch thrived, physically as well as mentally, compared with those receiving less or no touch. Ironic, I think silently in my head. Well, you did at least touch me, for the first few years until my brother was born and then he was so sick that he took up all your attention. But what about saying forever that my first sentence, at 9 months or some ridiculous age, was 'squirrels eat acrons but people don't. Why?' You proudly thought I was showing signs of being a budding scientist, when in reality I just wanted to eat the acorns. Not sure what would be the rat equivalent of that.

Then she goes on to suggest that I should introduce my shy son to girls by having an au-pair or sending him for tutoring, or language school in France. I remember the young men she employed as housekeepers when I was that age, and the tutors, and being sent away to Europe. Maybe that's what it was all about. All I say is that he'll learn to talk to people in his own time.

I patiently try to explain what I'm doing with my life, the degree to which I know what it is, and the degree to which it might just be a fad or a phase I'm passing through. Not sure why I try. I proudly announce that I've been asked to teach another yoga class. Here I am, working both in paid and volunteer jobs almost every day of the week, completing my second doctorate, trying to excuse myself to someone that dropped out of a Masters' in Art History and never worked.

I thought that it wouldn't get to me this time. You've been here for two and a half days, and I just want to cry.

You are very sweet about it now, trying to take it back after, this is new. I'm sure that your parents never did that. Your mother threw stuff and worse, she knowingly threw words in order to cause serious harm. And your foot and knee hurt, after falling last week, so you can't walk as much as usual to get the energy out that way. Pain can make one irritable.

Maybe I need to stand up and object to some of this. Just waiting for the storm to pass over, there is not a lot of point in yelling at the sky. Not sure what I'm dealing with. Are you a force of nature, or an angry kitten? Or maybe just a storm in a teacup.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Bodies are interesting

When I was in my 20's I co-taught an undergrad anthropology class on 'The Body and the Senses.' At the time, I saw my role as teaching the anthropology students about sensory neurophysiology and brain anatomy. They didn't like me very much! Today I realized for the first time that bodies are actually pretty interesting.

I finally finished reading Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain. She links pain and creativity or imagination, albeit rather tenuously, by defining 3 kinds of objects that she names a 'weapon', a 'tool' and an 'artifact'. A weapon has two ends, with power on one end and sentience (pain) on the other end. A tool is similar to a weapon, except that it has power and sentience both on the same end, acting on an inanimate surface. An artifact is a lever or arc that has no obvious ends and is a projection of the body onto an object which is then interjected by other bodies. Examples of artifacts are clothes, languages, and God. Riding on the bus this evening I noticed that we surround ourselves with artifacts, the crust of the earth is cluttered with them. I think we are as much made by them as making them. For instance, Scarry talks a lot about the chair as an artifact, and imagines Adam making the first chair for Eve to ease the pain of her body standing on her feet all day. But Western man (and woman) is shaped by the chair, chairs make our bodies lose the ability to bend in the middle and sit on the ground. The internet makes us lose our memory. We are made out of this stuff as much as we are made out of our genes and the food we eat.

One of the things that interests me, which Scarry barely mentions, is that this stuff we are all made of is co-created. Unlike Adam making the first chair for Eve, our chairs carry within them a whole history of chair design. When I was 6 years old, I used to wonder if my life had really happened, or if it was just a dream that I had dreamt and I was still really only 3. At that age I had to learn a new language because we moved to a different country, and I realized that I couldn't have invented a whole new language myself so therefore at least some part of my life was real. Artifacts can go beyond the creative capacity of a single individual, even a single generation of people that happen to be living on the earth at the same time.

We imbue objects and artifacts with sentient qualities, and can get quite upset with them at times. In some ways, I think this is a good thing. For example, my son was once upset that his surfboard had hit him on the head, so he spent a good few minutes cursing and being angry at the ocean. God can safely be blamed for most mishaps. Without God, we have only ourselves or other people to blame and that can be problematic. A student in my yoga class seemed tired, and I asked her after the class how she was feeling. She seemed a little embarrassed by the question, and said she wasn't doing too well today because she had skipped her cardio workout. I felt so sad for her, feeling that she had to do so much and that I was asking for more. Later I complimented her on listening to her body.

Going back to the theme of yoga as a religion, I realized the other day that when I took my yoga mat to the park I was noticing all the other people carrying yoga mats. I notice them all the time now. The mat is evidently the artifact of the new religion, since yoga can be practiced perfectly well without it. Most reminiscent of a Muslim prayer rug. The mat serves to protect our skin and hands from the surface of the world. I will [unconsciously] enact death by lying on it, but not get too close to the dirt?

Over the years, I came to my yoga teachers for advice on what to do for different aches and pains - asthma, blocked sinuses, backache, pain in the knees and neck. Not only for myself, but also for my ex. I trusted them more than my doctor, whom I thought to be in the pay of drug companies, and I found them more helpful than a massage therapist, because they told me what I could do for myself rather than doing it for me. I never thought about this up until now, perhaps I just regarded them as experts on the body, but I came to them as one would to a priestess or a shaman.

Summary of philosophical conclusions so far:
- Pain reminds me that I'm me, in my body, which is in the world and not in my imagination.
- Yoga has the elements of a religion. It has no god, but it incorporates ritual enactments of death. The central artifact of modern Western yoga is the mat.
- The power of yoga to heal pain may be based as much on faith as exercise.

Also thinking about eating disorders, and the problem of trying to attract clients to a group. If I have an eating disorder, then I am at war with my body. The therapist has to align with me and not with my body, so saying things like 'accept your body' and 'be diet free' would be counterproductive. If I have a pain disorder, then my body is at war with me. The therapist has to align with the part that experiences the pain, because that part feels like the real me.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Is yoga the new godless religion?

Project sleep has not been going too well (I slept for the whole of 4 hours). I've been reading Patanjali's Yoga Sutras online, and looking up the life and works of Wilhelm Reich. Yes, that is Yoga Sutras (not kama sutra) and Wilhelm Reich (not Theodore Reich) although the other ways around might have made more sense, in retrospect.

A friend of mine said, after the yoga prayer for peace at Power to the Peaceful last month, that we [scientists] have blown away the people's religion so they have cobbled one together out of the pieces. Yoga practice has been increasing steadily in the US since the 1990's, to the degree that up to 12% of Americans are now thought to have tried it and with 3% becoming regular yogis. Those who practice yoga regularly do so on average 5 times per week, and are split roughly equally between seeing it as a form of exercise, therapy (mostly for back pain) and a spiritual practice (guesstimated from various online sources). Research shows that yoga is an effective treatment for back pain, migraines, recovery from chemotherapy etc. It both increases wellbeing and reduces the use of pain medications as compared with self-help control groups. I wonder why? Perhaps this has something to do with breathing and relaxation, but I suspect there is also an element of faith. A recent study found that Catholics exposed to pictures of the Virgin Mary experienced less pain when exposed to pain-inducing stimulation, as opposed to atheists exposed to the same pictures or other calming works of art. [There was also a change in the pattern of activation in their brains, but this only matters if you doubt what they reported and either way there is always room for doubt]. The point I'm making is that while yoga is not associated explicitly with faith in any particular object, faith in yoga is part of the health zeitgeist.

My insomniac reading suggests that yoga in its origins is anything but godless. In fact, according to wikipedia, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (around 150 BC) were a branching away from the older Samkhya system of Hindu religion or philsophy, adding the specification of a divine entity and a practice for gaining disentanglement from the bondage of human nature and unification with the divine (possibly the meaning of the word yoga). Hatha yoga, or the practice of asanas (postures) was outlined in the 15th Century in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Swatmarama. Why is this so popular now? The focus on the body matches the materialism of our culture, as does the obsessive emphasis on detail - posture, diet and lifestyle made into words. Samkhya philosophy stems from a primary dichotomy of self vs. other (rather than mind vs. body) that suits our individualist society better than the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion, with its baggage of an unpopular creation myth and the pre-requisite faith in the miraculous.

Personal experience of yoga suggests the opposite. My first experience of chanting om at a workshop in the North of England, years after I had started asana practice, was one of surprising loss of self in the community. It made me want to do this (chanting) with my own people, in a synagogue, not here with a random gathering and improperly explained articles of faith. Around the same time, I used yoga while babysitting to help calm my 8-year-old charge who was having an asthma attack. I had her lie in savasana on some cushions and breathe. Later she told me that she used to live with her family above the Quaker meeting place and watch people practicing yoga while her father was working on his PhD. She remembered this pose being described as the corpse pose, and she used to practice it on her own wondering if this was what it was like to be dead. I have to say that death is fascinating, and as a child I used to meditate on what it might be like to join some small animal that seemed to die easily, such as a sparrow, on its mysterious journey into nothingness. One thing I learned from the Yom Kipur sermon this year was that fasting and mourning practices are a symbolic exercise in death. As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I find savasana one of the most beneficial poses and like to do it before and after the other poses to experience them at their fullest.

I mentioned Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst. If you want a good laugh, look up the 'orgone accumulator'. Now I will have to sit straight-faced through a training on Reichian analysis. Yikes! Anyway, he got in trouble with the FDA and the FBI in the 1950's because of the sex taboo (compounded by the fact that he was a socialist and a charlatan among other things). I would argue that money is an even greater taboo in the wider society. In my corner (if I have one) sickness is taboo. I recently heard a psychiatrist say that his patients don't mind having a disorder, but they don't want to know that they're sick. It hasn't always been this way. In the past, people loved their ailments. Read Pepys. Or maybe death is the real taboo, and that's why we can't sleep and need to practice savasana.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Meditation on meaning

"... intellectual arguments if "inconsistent" may cease to be intellectual arguments, but human behavior, if inconsistent, does not cease to be human behavior; and economic systems are closer to being extended and materialized forms of behavior than to being intellectual arguments. Thus to identify them as "contradictory" or "inconsistent" does not announce the alarming character of the dislocation that Marx actually attempts to convey. Similarly, to describe the departure from the model as its "falsification" would be more appropriate if the model were bodying forth the nature of "truth" rather than the nature of "fictions and made things." " (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain).

These are fragments that I shore against my ruin:
That minutes I spend on the phone with some lonely person, or hours face to face, or the share of an hour doing yoga, help someone get through their days. While I may be a replaceable part of a broader system, somebody has to be in my place. I make no claims to heal anybody only to allow healing to happen. In another culture, perhaps, I would be a priest or a shaman or a family elder. But I like being where I am.

Scarry claims that work is an organized system of pain that promotes the imaginative creation of cultural artifacts. My work is constantly creative and pain free.

Scratch that. Saying goodbye is hard. Therapists are paid in order to suffer the pain of ultimately letting go. Not for the pleasure of holding onto somebody's memories, but for the cost of erasing them.

I work in a bizarre organization where almost nobody is paid, in the midst of a culture that makes Mammon our god and expects from him the kind of truth that Marx expects. The biggest taboo in the broader culture is money. I wonder what is our biggest taboo? Perhaps I'm too close up to see it.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

McNears Beach, CA


Where else affords free beaches with hot showers in October? And just as I was running out of dance class credits and wondering what to do tomorrow evening, I get a call to sub for Ashtanga yoga.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Strange hills with lupin

Posted by Picasa

Madrone trees, February

Posted by Picasa

Madrone trees, October

Posted by Picasa

Dead tree at Las Trampas, February

Posted by Picasa

Dead tree at Las Trampas, October

Posted by Picasa

Coyote, Cow


The cows did not seem bothered when a couple of coyotes walked through their field.
Posted by Picasa

Not Waving But Drowning

Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

What if, swimming against the tide

What if I had my bike with me that day, and we had gone just a couple of miles further along 2nd St? We would have come to a little beach park, overlooking the bay. I would have swum, like I did there today, maybe you would have swum too. Things might have been different. You wanted someone to come home to, and we could have been that for one another, perhaps... Except that you didn't even acknowledge this was what you wanted, you only projected it onto me, saying it was what I wanted. And I'm not certain it is. It would have been nice, for sure. But I'm pretty happy coming home to my cat and my dog and my kids, listening to Bach really loud and cooking lentil soup like my grandmother used to make it. Yet I still think of you there now, waiting for me on the beach perhaps, not knowing you're waiting just there for some other reason, as I swim back to the shore against the tide, avoiding a trail of jellyfish. I know that reality doesn't work like that, that all the what ifs spangle out in other dimensions only to peter away and they don't generally loop back into this one. What if the jellyfish had stung me on the way out? They might still sting on the way back in. There are other less pleasant what ifs, spreading from our encounter, measured in millimeters rather than miles. Am I condemned to be haunted forever by all the what ifs?

And all the others. You who remembered that I wanted to swim in the bay at midnight and that's why I would like to be where you are now, near the ocean. If I were there with you we could have played hooky and biked to the beach together instead of waiting for the train that is running late. Why do I feel like I've missed the boat and you're on it?

Why does there always have to be a you? Maybe my present happiness is conditional on the one who is always there, just a phone call away. You will never read this, because you think it's silly, and you're probably right. Probably, you will never be here for me to come home to, but you know that I'm here for you. I hope you know that. Thank goodness we've stopped playing at maybe, forgoing the small pleasures of life for the sake of some future that might never happen to either of us, whether each for ourselves or one for the other.

Sleepless in Berkeley II

Another sleepless night in Berkeley - maybe it's something in the air, the full moon - who knows? At least this time I rode my bike through without having to stop for the busy traffic, and the pedestrians I encountered were on the whole friendly, saying hello as they stuffed guitars and other instruments into their truck. Some were yelling, but only at each other not at me.

Reading about identity and the internet for the next philosophy group brought to mind my readings on pain, and a conversation I had earlier in the day while hiking down from Las Trampas. Pain is what brings us back to the self, establishing the reality of both self and world as in pinching yourself to make sure you're not dreaming. Pain means that the world is real and not all in my imagination, and also that I am really me, in my body, which is in the world. The boundary of the body, the skin, is what binds me to the world. In the world of words, on the internet, there is no real me. I was reading the history of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and I looked at some of their websites. Perhaps they need to specify whether killing other characters is allowed, because there is no possibility of causing bodily pain only social pain. I would be curious if players ever experienced bodily pain as a result of their characters' adventures online. I imagine that other sensations such as sexual ones are possible, even likely, but I wonder about pain. Perhaps the imperative 'do not kill' comes from the possibility of inflicting pain on a fellow sentient being, and when we know others are not sentient we just don't care in the same way. I am the intentional, willing I that can create my own identity in a world of words and also the sentient I that experiences unwilled pain.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Mmmm

I feel extremely fortunate to be living here. There was not a cloud in the sky this morning when I walked my dog. My friend in the city was available for a last minute coffee together, at a cafe serving fine oatmeal with fresh fruit, sugar and cream. Another friend joined me for acro-yoga in the park and I tried some new poses as a base, while watching stunt planes flying in the distance. I did some not bad handstands, the first time I've had the courage to do those in about 7 years. On my way back home, the view of the bay from the Bart train was so amazing that I wish I had time to take out my camera. The day ended with Friday night waltz (which is actually on Saturday) and a new friend came over for tea afterwards. I even read, or at least turned the pages, through about half of Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain, which I'm reading for my dissertation. More on that when I finish.

Project sleep is not going so well...

Friday, October 10, 2008

What Really Matters?

Is it the leap of the heart in the moment
before you drop from the Tarzan rope?
The cold thrill of the water,
hearing yourself scream?
Or is it the moment before,
the decision, conquering fear,
holding onto the rope, letting go
of the ground in order to reach it?
Is it the splash, the people watching,
your kids watching, watching your kids
or someone else's kids?
This last adventure of summer
the blackberries drying on the bushes
or the first day of school,
the humdrum of hopes and dreams?

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Bicycle Day

When I was a kid growing up in Israel we used to call Yom Kipur (aka the Day of Atonement) Bicycle Day, because there were no cars in the street. Nobody drove. Not that it's a greater sin on the High Holy Days than any regular Sabbath, just a local tradition. One year, I must have been about 8, I cycled all the way to a village the other side of town with my younger cousin riding on the cross bar of my blue Raleigh that we had brought over on a plane from England. We took picnic supplies with us (of course, all the stores were closed) and my parents probably had no idea where we were because there were no cellphones in those days and nobody worried. Only kids were on the streets, the parents were all busy praying or fasting, or privately not doing those things. The traffic lights were still on, even the one my mother had organized a demonstration about before it was finally erected to prevent further traffic accidents on the main road. At first, we played at following the lights, then we just ignored them.

This year, I went to synagogue and my soul was suitably tormented by a lecture on the cultural anthropology of mourning that included the phrase 'macro-feedback-loop'. I did not ask for that, nor did I ask for the phrase 'revives the dead' to be replaced by 'gives life to everything'. I have no need for a God that gives life to everything. Lightning in a pond, some organic chemistry and evolution will suffice. Raises the fallen, heals the sick, frees prisoners and... 'gives life to everything'? It is a non-sequiter. I want a God that makes miracles, thank you. I want something that binds me to my spiritual identity and inspires me. Not 'consoling the bereaved' as a duty whose worth cannot be measured, although I'm sure I could do more of it and that would be a good thing. Not when it is a mistranslation of 'accompanying the dead'. Never mind that I'm an atheist.

Maybe you have to be in the right mood. The best ever Yom Kipur drash I heard was by a woman rabbi in London, when my father was in a coma in hospital a few weeks before he died. She quoted Kant, sadly I have forgotten the context but it caught my attention because unlike Spinoza he never was one of us. She mentioned the dwindling numbers of Jews in Britain, and how a survey in the US had shown that short of thrice weekly religious school the best predictor of kids staying Jewish was keeping some sort of kosher at home. She said people laughed at her keeping kosher when she came over to the US for rabinnical school, but now she felt vindicated. Ever since then we've only eaten ham sandwiches outside the home.

Earlier in the day I played at the swing. It was gorgeously clear over the bay and the view of the Golden Gate Bridge was amazing. For the first time, I stood up on the swing and noticed all the other amusements. Someone must have hung a new trapeze and Tarzan rope on a nearby tree a little further downhill, and there was what appeared to be a yellow tightrope between two trees higher up, but loose and with knots in it. Next time, I'm bringing bicycle gloves.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Lucky we can wear shorts this time of year

Especially when the October wind
 -- Dylan Thomas
Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

Behind a post of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make of you the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.


Swinging in the dark

Tonight I went for a walk with my dog to swing on the rope-swing atop Albany Hill. I watched the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge vanish and reappear from behind the Eucalyptus trees, and looked up at the crescent moon and the stars, sensing the cool air on my face, a little dizzy as I spun slowly around. I felt rather lonely after having dinner with a new friend, another conversation cut short by my skepticism.

You are a theoretical physicist who wants to find that everything is made from different arrangements of one or maybe four kinds of stuff, not hundreds. This is the dream of physics that again and again proves either wrong or mired in complexity. I wish I had touched your tattoo, in the design of an atom, binding you to your chosen path. I wish I had let you know how I felt touched by your dream. I wish I was better at making connections than breaking them.

We are perhaps all bound together like the particles in an atom but can never can fully bridge the gap between us because of some stronger force, experiencing at best slippery moments of connection that jostle us against each other like flotsam and jetsam in a stream. Little moments of coming together like stars in a lifetime of darkness, that make us imagine what it would be like to be a stream of light intertwining with another stream, a web of light glowing across the night sky.

Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that in High School I had a crush on my physics tutor, who was a post-doc theoretical physicist at the time and then ended up going back to his family business, running a sweatshop for cheap clothes. You and he came from the same island. I love islands, the proximity of the sea, the beaches, the sense of being constantly on the edge.

We are the stuff that dreams are made of. We are as clay in the hand of the maker, at his whim to broaden and at his whim to shorten. The best we can do is hold on to each other.

Last summer, I e-mailed a friend about how I had met an old man on the hill. He wanted to talk and tell me his story. I listened for a while, then my phone rang, and he said 'in my day we came up here to be alone. Now you carry your friends in your pocket.' I made my excuses and left, feeling bad afterwards that I could have made a real connection with this man but instead I was drawn back to the humdrum of everyday dreams. The story helped me reconnect with my friend at the time, but now we are losing touch.

Now I feel lost. I am trying to focus on real connections, unmediated by electronics. I was so happy when, walking back from the hill, a friend returned a call on my cellphone. But e-mail was swallowing up too much of my time. Who knows if blogging will be any better? Teaching 6th graders about the Day of Atonement, some kids were bragging about how long they had fasted. I asked why we fast, and they didn't really know. To torture the soul, I explained. Then I said that I plan to have a cellphone fast as well, and their eyes goggled. I couldn't do that, they all said.

Although some had said they believe in the story of creation, only one knew how to retell it and that she learned elsewhere. None of those who believed in evolution could retell that tale. We live in an era of soundbites and tags, all we have to do is remember some key words and we can look it up on the internet. But we are creatures of connection, and we feel lost without our internal narratives. No wonder we reach out all the time for the most tenuous of links.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Oversincerity

I looked up how many other bloggerers shared my interests, favorite movies, etc. To my horror and consternation, the most popular one was Philosophy (at > 40,000)! The least popular was The World According to Garp, only 550 list this as a favorite movie. So I decided to dare and add some more honest interests. Navel-gazing (93 bloggerers), and oversincerity (1 - that would be me).

Bluegrass Festival

Posted by Picasa

Moonlight Frisbee


Walking back from the Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park on Saturday night, I saw these guys playing frisbee in the moonlight, so I took a picture of them and the crescent moon overhead.
Posted by Picasa

Sleepless in Berkeley

Normally I have a clear run, cycling through Berkeley at midnight from my shift on the crisis hotline. Tonight, though, there were two cars traveling in opposite directions up and down one thoroughfare (I had to take a foot off the pedal) and a white limo U-turned on University Avenue just ahead of me. A dog-walker quietly picked up after her large, black dog, someone was walking home from Bart, there was a car filling up at the gas station and a pedestrian with oddly tied hair walked across San Pablo. It reminded me of the night I drove back from the hills and encountered a man clad in only a blue surgeon's gown and a black trash bag, and there was a large deer with fine antlers crossing the road. I was glad to be in a car that night.

My inspiration for this blog was one written by someone I met online, which was disarmingly open and endearingly authentic. That is a hard act to follow. The biggest problem is that many of my thoughts are about other people, and I worry about betraying their trust by writing about them or about our relationships. So I've decided to write as though I were writing to the person in question. You (you know who you are if you're reading this) inspired my blog, with your mix of Leaves of Grass energy, Woody Allen angst and Tristram Shandy quirkiness. Thank you.

I am taking an e-mail diet. I will only be checking my e-mail Monday morning and Wednesday or Thursday. Perhaps this will help me find time for writing my dissertation, strengthen my bonds with the real people in my life, and last but not least promote sleep...

Friday, October 3, 2008

The moment of creation, Thoughts

I just finished reading Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. His premise is that we can learn something from the structure of language about how humans think. He argues that while assuming communicative intent, relevant and veridical content, and so on most speech acts involve an element of politeness with the aim of preserving 'face'. Human interactions are governed, at an emotional level, by three forces - communality, authority (or deference) and reciprocity - and these forces set the context for communication and the scales on which 'face' is to be preserved. According to Pinker, we understand complex, abstract concepts by their metaphorical relation to simple, intuitive ones, that come from our discrete, topological understanding of space and time. Communality is the force for togetherness, authority is the quest to power, and reciprocity is the desire for fair exchanges. Pinker claims that it is only through metaphorically extending the definition of the emotional commons to include knowledge that we are able to advance our scientific theories and have rational discourse, including fair legal and mercantile process. The goal of education, according to Pinker, should be to shed the garb of our emotional baggage, now it has been pointed out, and to go beyond 'face'.

I like Pinker's revision of the Benthamian stance so pervasive in this post-Freudian culture that there is always some 'secondary gain' an imaginary 'bottom line' to all our interactions with others. It seems that linguists have come up with this concept of 'face' through their analysis of dialogue that simply fails to squeeze onto a single dimension.

Much of Pinker's book is anglo-centric, and some distinctions (like the one between 'for' and 'to') simply don't translate. I grew up speaking Hebrew, a langauge that lacks that distinction. Nevertheless, while focusing on the inferences drawn from one language he has come to conclusions that could potentially be supplemented by examining other languages in as much detail. I can remember the experience, during a time in my life when I was switching from speaking mostly in English to speaking mostly in Hebrew, of having a thought in my mind and holding it there before choosing which language to think it in. So my intuition is that thought precedes and shapes language, although not all thoughts are translatable into all languages and the language of a person's thoughts places bounds on the ones they are likely to have.

I believe that the goal of education should be critical thinking. Pinker gives no examples of what moving away from the emotional aspects of language would be like because, I think, that is not actually possible. All metaphor is, in my view, empty without tying it in to some narrative. It's like a dictionary that allows you to translate from one language to another, but where is the story? Critical thinking is not an escape from preserving 'face'. Instead, it is the faculty of following a story or a line of reasoning and holding in memory all the different parts, checking them out not only against a simple, intuitive snapshot frame of the dominant metaphor but also against all the other available stories that have become a part of the culture. We can change the way people talk, in fact politeness like language varies from one culture to another as well as over historical time. We may not be able to sever the links between language, thoughts and feelings, but we can and do rearrange them all the time.

I created this blog to share my thoughts and observations. They probably won't all be as linear and coherent as the above book review. It's interesting to think that there was something I wanted so much to express about that book, it made a big impression on me and I persevered with reading it through some mental resistance to the content and tedium over the more technical parts concerning verbs. There is so little time for reading, and so much time for expressing oneself these days! And I could have just added it to a book review site, but that's not really what I want. I don't want to offer my judgment on the book to others. I want to express how I related to it. There may be no audience, but I don't mind dancing alone on a dark stage to my own music.

Next on my reading list: Feast of Souls, by CS Friedman. Recommended by my son.

Next in life: sleep... Why is this so hard that I am always trying to pay back a debt in catnaps?